Write an essay of approximately 3000 words (about ten typed double-spaced pages) on one of the following topics. These topics, remember, are only suggestions and possible directions. It's very important that you establish a well-defined direction and a context for your own thinking, and that you focus your work in a rigorous, critical manner. Please follow the current MLA style for format and documentation.
1. A topic of your own devising, in consultation with me.
2. In The Long Revolution, Raymond Williams asserts that "culture is ordinary." Michel de Certeau, among many others, addresses the idea of "everyday life." With reference to a specific context or cultural formation, discuss the possible strategies, tactics and / or critical practices that can be used to approach the ordinary, the quotidian, the everyday, the popular.
3. Michel Foucault's work focuses, arguably, on the nature of power. With reference to a specific context or cultural formation, discuss the production and exertion of power. Does power have material or spatial aspects?
4. Queer theory often addresses, critically, what has been named heteronormativity: the social, cultural and familial normalizing of heterosexuality. With reference to a specific context or cultural formation, discuss the production, the dissemination and / or the consumption and use of heteronormative practices and styles.
5. Homi Bhabha writes, in the essay included in our course text, about rethinking epistemologies -- modes of knowing -- as enunciative practices. How is a speaking subject put at issue in assertions of racial, gendered or otherwise cultural identities? How does language play a role in the formation of an identity?
6. How have technologies and mediums of communication -- electronic or otherwise -- impacted on our conception of culture? Focus on a specific context or cultural formation to pursue this question.
7. Discuss the relationship(s) between the cultural and the aesthetic. Can there be, as Steven Greenblatt claims, a "poetics of culture"? Do literary or artistic canons really have much impact on cultural practices? How? make sure you focus on a specific context or cultural formation to examine this issue.
Due on Friday, December 17. Please submit your paper to the main English Office, BuTo397, by 4:30 that day. Papers will be graded and returned on Tuesday, January 4.